Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington ignite Hulu's sharp, soapy Little Fires Everywhere: Review
) watches as her family's home — a stately brick Tudor in Shaker Heights, Ohio — burns to the ground in 1997. You don't need a degree in TV to know that we'll spend the next eight episodes learning what led up to the fire — but Hulu's sharp, soapy, and emotionally intense limited series is more than your standard suburban whodunit.
Elena is the kind of woman who is never fully dressed without a string of pearls. She portions out her nightly glass of chardonnay in a Pyrex measuring cup and hands her four teenagers — Moody , Izzy , Trip , and Lexie — color-coded lunch bags as they head off to school. When she spots Mia Warren and her daughter, Pearl , sleeping in their beat-up Chevette, Elena's first instinct is to call the police.
As different as Mia and Elena are, they each have built their existence, and their concept of motherhood, around a choice they won't allow themselves to regret. For reasons that are far too complicated to explain here, Mia and Elena wind up on opposing sides of a custody battle between a Chinese immigrant and a wealthy Shaker Heights couple . The fragile peace between them explodes into open hostility.
Witherspoon slips into Elena's twinsets with prim precision, punctuating her performance with small choices — a pinched face here, a chilly hair-tuck there — that are little masterpieces of passive aggression. Washington's Mia is a fierce and prickly protector, forever teetering on the edge of a rage breakdown. Watching the actresses face off in later episodes delivers all the giddy pleasure of a Krystle-Alexis showdown, minus the hair-pulling.
There's also a rich and satisfying teen drama nestled inside Little Fires' saga of adult ennui. The young cast — especially Stott as the angsty Izzy and Lewis as the lovelorn Moody — is impressive. Pearl's entanglement with the Richardson kids results in turmoil both urgent and existential . For Elena, loving her children means keeping them on a well-manicured path. "If you follow the rules, you'll succeed," she tells Izzy.
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